The internal combustion engine powering the vast majority of today's automobiles, power boats and lawn mowers has many drawbacks: the cost of fuel, the inconvenience of refueling, the depletion of a finite energy source, and the environmental impact of extracting, transporting, and burning billions of barrels of petroleum every year. There has thus been a long standing effort to develop alternative automotive energy sources. Utilizing electrical energy is one alternative, but this approach has required the use of batteries that have to date been proven to be too heavy, too expensive, and too limited in capacity to be of significant marketable use. The enclosed invention depends on electricity as the ultimate source of energy but stores that energy in a more practical way. Rather than relying on batteries, the electrical energy is converted to and stored as heat within a reservoir. This heat reservoir serves essentially as a replacement for the boiler in a steam driven vehicle. Without the boiler, there is no longer the need to vent combusted gas products and thus the greatest source of inefficiency in automotive steam engines is ablated. Furthermore, since the heat is already present within the heat reservoir, there is no longer then need to ignite a lamp within a boiler and wait for steam pressure to build up. The steam can be generated almost instantly.
Most of the engineering employing heat battery technology is directed towards regulating the operating temperature of specific components within various mechanical and electrical devices. The use of heat as a significant means of energy storage has received far less attention and efforts in this regard have been generally limited to home heating or providing a means for power stations to store energy during non-peak hours. There have been few efforts contemplating the use of a heat battery as a means of powering vehicles.
One effort in this regard is U.S. Pat. No. 5,385,214. It teaches that a heat battery can be used to power an automobile. It envisions utilizing the extraordinarily high heat capacity of water at its supercritical point of 374° C. and 221 bars, but to maintain the supercritical state while adding heat to the system would require an ever greater expansion of the heat battery. The exceedingly high volume required to store any significant amount of heat in this way makes this technology ill-suited for any common purpose.
Another effort in this regard is U.S. Pat. No. 4,094,377. It teaches that a steam engine can be used to recharge the batteries of an electric vehicle and that the heat for the steam engine's boiler can be derived from the sun. Since an automobile has very limited area available for solar panels, the amount of energy so derived is merely supplemental and can only marginally extend the range of an electric vehicle.
Strangely, the most significant contributions to the field of heat powered vehicles stems from the efforts of electricity producers to create buffer systems that address supply shortages that would otherwise arise when demand variations cannot be met with supply variations. These asynchronous situations have sparked numerous inventions relating to storing electricity in the form of heat. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,146,057 teaches the use of aluminum as a heat storage means when the primary source of energy is solar and the heat is to be later retrieved in the form of electricity. JP2000097498 teaches a heat battery employing magnesia, magnetite, silica and/or alumina as heat storage materials and JP2007032866 teaches the importance of heat exchanger design, employing the use of fins emanating from the heat exchanger tube, when a heat battery is used for electricity generation.